Geeking

I must now offi­cial­ly declare that it is total­ly beyond my abil­i­ties (and pri­or­i­ties) to get caught up on LJ. There are well over 1000 entries since I last read every­thing, so I’m not try­ing anymore.

I rebuilt this PC over the week­end. I’m still very cross because I want­ed to put Win2000 on it instead of Win­ME, and my instal­la­tion CDs for Win2000 are dam­aged. Grrr. Actu­al­ly, I was toy­ing with mak­ing this a Linux/Windows mul­ti-boot machine, but Sam insists that I’m just ask­ing for trou­ble if I do that.

My old copies of both Par­ti­tion Mag­ic and Sys­tem Com­man­der were on flop­pies (yes, they’re REALLY old!) and are no longer read­able. I guess I could con­tact the com­pa­nies about replac­ing the media, but they’d prob­a­bly laugh at me with soft­ware that old.

And for some rea­son, this sil­ly thing has decid­ed that it does­n’t like the onboard audio any­more since the rebuild. There are no resource con­flicts, but it’s just mak­ing that dread­ful con­stant stut­ter­ing sound that Win­doze makes when there is an audio con­flict. I’ve removed and added it back and so on with no luck. There’s no new hard­ware present oth­er than an old modem, and the con­flict was present before I added the modem (which I want to use for fax­es). Set­ting up the fax modem on the serv­er would be much bet­ter, actu­al­ly. I’m a wee bit ner­vous about dri­ver issues—it was a bitch to track down dri­vers for it for Win­dows. But it would be love­ly to be able to share the fax and send it from the oth­er machines.

Sam upgrad­ed the serv­er to Red Hat Lin­ux 8 as some­thing of a tri­al run. It’s run­ning quite nice­ly. The next step is to actu­al­ly redo it from scratch—not a rebuild. We have a mar­velous 160GB hard dri­ve to use in start­ing clean. It had a 20GB and a 10GB dri­ve before, so this will be a love­ly change.

I have one of those stu­pid ques­tions that shows that I don’t real­ly know that much about run­ning a Lin­ux serv­er. We run Sam­ba, and we want the kids to be able to log in to their Sam­ba accounts from any PC. But we don’t want them to be able to log on to the actu­al serv­er itself. Since we can’t exact­ly lock that machine away in a serv­er room, I’m not sure of how to do that. Clues from the alpha geeks out there?